Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Malthusian economics, as we know well from
the works of Charles Dickens, was essentially posed to get rid of the poor and
usher in the industrial revolution. Today, we understand the digitalisation
revolution as an ongoing aspect of just such similar politics, as preliminary
to the journey to Mars. By forcing the population into the strait jacket of
conformity to a laboratory society, the Modi government has made it very clear
the politics ofits extremism. Ghettoisation
of Muslims in Gujerat was the first step, Extinction of the Poor the second, as
this government supports industrialised farming and conspicuous consumption,
promising smart cities and sanitised waterfronts. Amit Shah promises a car to
every villager, as he does not have to face the traffic jams and the poison gas
of the city of Delhi, in his siren wailing, gun toting -security guarded,airconditioned and curtained car.

In America, Trump’s victory establishes the
reign of similar right wingers. There too, the poor will be sent off to war, to
“fight for their country”. The poor are enlisted from the agricultural
populations in stifled hinterlands, and those who in the city,find no other avenues to work. They are
promised University education, on their return, or are treated for medical and psychiatric
disorders in state funded camps. While they work very hard to normalise, their
real life is represented in the patterns of loneliness and despair, and
constant running away, mentally and physically, that makes them typical of a
new class of refugees. The occupation of war keeps the arms manufacturing, the
medical industry and the insurance companies well integrated with the genetic
manipulation of food industries.

A demonetised proletariat in India is
rendered servile, and kept from earning their daily wages. They are subjugated
by the machineries of the state, which include private security agencies,as well as police, who threaten them with
dire consequences should they break out of the interminable queues to which
they are shackled, in order to buy their bare necessities. A death here and
there, a suicide now and then, are all flecked off as the unnecessary detritus
of a well oiled state machinery that speaks to itself.The banalities of Mr Jaitley can only come
from being completely out of touch with the every day life of the nation. As
for the black money, it is turning into white, at the invitation of the
government, and we presume that the quantities of used notes will now be
recycled into making new notes, which will return to the public, when the
machines have been recalibrated. Everyone waits anxiously in queues to withdraw
from the bank, and to pay the daily labourers they may employ as carpenters or
gardeners or maids. The ideologies of the political parties are varied, so each
political party, which has behaved exactly as we expect them to do, which is
populist and petty bourgeoisie, including the Communists, ask the same
question, “Why were we not told?”

Trump’s contribution to war mongering has
been so arrogant, that it causes some embarrassment to the viewer. Modi’s call
to war against terrorism carries much the same rhetoric. By demonetisation, the
State’s coffers are full, and war is one way of spending the cash. Let’s hope
that the military does not become a collective of mercenaries looking to
exchange lives for promised pensions. When the Government said, after a tragic
suicide by an ex soldier that thepromised OROP was onlyto collect
votes, the nation was completely startled. A young girl’s suicide after several
attempts to get money out from the bank has been horrific. No one more than the
Indian media has been alert to the travesties of justice in this government.
Can we just stop to ask why the RSS thinktanks in the Government would believe
that they can do what they want, without thinking of the consequences. The
Ambanis are not in the news, the Adnanis have everything their way, the Swiss
accounts of those who siphoned money out of the country are in a haze of
anonymity. The rich do not look discomfited one bit, their credit cards are
numerous, and their servants stand in queues for them. Whose laughing now all
the way to the bank?

Prime Minister Modidid not know that majority of Indian people
are not yet digitalised, because they are wage workers, whomay have mobile phones, but only literacy and
computer skills allow for internet banking? For those who are elderly, or first
generation literate, the miniscule screen of the mobile blips too fast, before
they can punch in the required information. We know, even in the case of 40
naval officers who lost money in internet banking, that education and power are
not enough to tackle the hackers in IT.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

The
late K.M Mathew, describes in his autobiography, the famous Mammen Mappillai
family, founders of the Malayala Manorama in Kerala. Written at the age of 90
years, Mathew wanders through a labyrinth, with the help of his mother’s ring,
symbolising love and integrity, left to him by his father, who had melted down
his wife’s ornaments and had a ring soldered for each of his children. So, K M
Mathew calls his memoir, “Ettam Modram” or “The Eighth Ring”,(Penguin Viking 2015) as he was the eighth
child.

The book takes on the analogy of the
Ancient Mariner, with the parallel of the sea farer who tells a tale, but we
remain transfixed as readers as the author writes about the travails of the
family which go through unusual situations of wealth and poverty. It is as much
a history of Kerala, told from the point of view of dominant caste politics, as
well as their relationships with their friends and those who servedthem. One of the chapters is devoted totally
to the collusion politics ofC.P Ramawami
Aiyar against the St Thomas Christians and the Mammen Mapillai family in
particular. Participation in the Freedom Movement by the author’s father, ,
eight years in prison and then to return broken hearted to the bedraggled
circumstances of their lost fortunes is told with intimate detail. The banks
that Mammen Mappilai owned were shut down, the newspaper closed, and the family
had to restart it’s ventures.

“Appachen could not bear the disappointment
when the establishment that he had nurtured with his dreams and hard work, and
that had grown to become the biggest insurance company in India, changed hands.
It had flourished better than our bank. I sometimes think that even if it had
not crashed, both the bank and the insurance company would anyway have been
nationalised later, in 1969. The insurance company that Chaidambaram Chettiar
took over from us became a part of the Life Insurance Corporation of India, the
LIC, when all the insurance companies in the country were nationalised.” (128)

Failure was not an embarrassment to the
Mammen Mappillai family. The women kept cows and sold the milk to support the
family. They all lived together, when circumstances forced them to, shifting
out to their own homes when their economic condition improved. Their lovely
home at Kuppapuram, near Allapuzha town became their icon, in the days
whenseveral members of the family were
shunting around in small housesin
Presidency towns, while finding new trades. The balloon factory became their
first successful business during the second world war, with it’s market in
Bombay, where one of the brothers lived and traded. The factory itself was in
one of their tea plantations,in
Kerrikunda in Chikmagalur District. The smell of latex killed off one of their
brothers, K.M. Jacob or Chacko, who had resisted the appearance of the factory
next to hiswell maintained colonial
bungalow, in the tea estate. However, the profit motive and the good of the
familyas a cluster, was seen to be
sufficient reason to establishthe
factory, in spite of the resistance of the brother who had inherited the family
gene for bad lungs.

How
the balloon factory led the way to the Madras Rubber Factory is an enthralling
story.TheManorama Family keeps its rural sensibility,
and overthrows a multinational company, using their wit, loyalty of workers,
and adherence to norms. Tragedy overtakes them many times, but they just pick
themselves up and start again. Among his father’s papers Mathew finds a note to
the children about losses incurred while building an empire. These include the
failure of a chit fund, which is a type of local banking; a lemon grass
producing oil unit; a wholesale business in Kottayam; a coir processing unit;
losses incurred in the Kottanad, Tamarasserry, and Nilambur estates; ship
purchased and losses incurred; a cigarette factory; a tile factory; losses in
land purchased in Punalur, Chengars, Pullikkanam. (199)Ofcourse these losses were nothing to the
closing down of the bank, insurance company and newspaper, during the time when
C.P ruled Kerala in the name of the regent.

The women K.M. Mathew writes about dominate
the narrative. His mother always hired a house in Alleppey, to have her babies,
since she didn’t want to give birth in Kuppappuram which flooded
regularly.His sisters in law are marked
by their grit and effeciency. As for romantic love, K.M. Mathew suggests that
he never had cause to think about women before his marriage, because it was not
the custom. His love for his wife, Annamma is apalpable and grateful lovewhich
was immortalised through a biography of the same name, which I look forward to
reading. Docility and authority were the two virtues women were meant to have,
apparently.